Learning How to Boost Profitability and Sustainability in Healthcare

Bridget Brizek is the director of outreach and support operations at Alverno Laboratories, an integrated hospital laboratory network serving communities throughout Indiana and Illinois. She spoke with Chicago Booth about her experience with the school’s Pricing for Profitability: Value Creation Strategies program and how she’s applying what she learned.

Why did you decide to enroll in the Pricing for Profitability program?

I believe it is part of our nature to constantly strive to learn and absorb anything and everything we can. Personally, I find it fulfilling to study new topics that I might not be as familiar with and move forward in my career. Studying value creation and pricing decisions were essential for me to contribute to my organization’s profitability and sustainability.

What insights from the program resonated with you the most?

Throughout the course, I was privileged to gain valuable insights with lasting impact on my career. I gained a better understanding of the role of marketing in creating value and setting prices. Effective pricing ensures consumers perceive your product’s value, which leads to sales success and long-term customer relationships. It influences revenue generation, profit margins, and overall business strategy. This is a role of marketing I had not thought of in the past, but I will expand on it within our organization moving forward.

How will you integrate the frameworks you learned into your organization?

The healthcare industry, as a whole, is seeing an expansion from traditional health services—where prices are driven by finance and payor contracts—to direct consumer services where pricing decisions are crucial. Moving forward, marketing must play a major role in our company when it comes to making such decisions. We will need to take on a new marketing strategy and include it in various committees and processes to help make pricing decisions that will best suit our client bases.

Pricing decisions are crucial in any business. Could you describe any data or methods you learned to use in making decisions and how they influenced your approach to pricing strategies?

In the laboratory landscape, we compete against entities that are both similar and larger in size. Economic value to the customer (EVC) is a valuable tool to understand the maximum price your customer is willing to pay for your product or service. It provides an advantage over competitors using a simple margin markup. Through this understanding, we can evaluate how we are setting our prices compared to our direct competitors and evaluate whether a change in our pricing strategy could put us ahead of them, especially in programs that we directly compete in.

Please describe the relationships you formed with classmates and how they impacted your experience.

The opportunity to collaborate with leaders from across the world was an incredible and unique experience that brought forth multiple viewpoints and cultural differences. These differences fostered an environment in which we could learn from each other in a way that allowed us to expand our discussions beyond the classroom. Class discussions brought to light the common pricing challenges across industries and countries.

Why did you choose Chicago Booth?

As one of the world’s top business schools, I knew that Chicago Booth could provide me with the necessary tools to further grow professionally. Booth’s teaching style illustrates frameworks and theories that can be applied in today’s business environment.

About the Pricing for Profitability Program

The Pricing for Profitability program is rigorous, research-based, and grounded in the economics of how markets and people actually behave. In the five-day program, you’ll apply analytics, artificial intelligence, and customer lifetime value models to sharpen pricing decisions. You’ll also explore behavioral economics, learning how bias, fairness, and choice architecture shape purchasing behavior. Explore the Pricing for Profitability program.